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The enzyme that puts branches of glucose on stevia (2019)
- bradknowles 4y agoSo, what is it that makes Stevia taste so horrible? Is this another Phenylketonuria problem?
- bradknowles 4y agoOr am I the only one who thinks that Stevia tastes horrible -- worse than any other artificial sweetener I've ever known?
- aidenn0 4y agoNo it takes awful to me as well.
- headmelted 4y agoI’ve never noticed an aftertaste. Anything with aspartame in it seems to make me immediately feel nauseous. Not sure if I’m an outlier here.
- colordrops 4y agoNo, I get that as well. It's subtle, but real.
- tejtm 4y agoStevia is just fine for me kind of sweet if you don't over do it, but I have known others with the same reaction as yours. I also like licorice, but cilantro barely tastes like anything to me a garnish with nothing to distinguish it from random yard clippings.
- klodolph 4y agoA percentage of people get a bitter taste from stevia. It depends on the person. I think that’s a big reason why it hasn’t replaced standards like sucralose.
- jansan 4y agoWhen Coca Cola released their Stevia sweetened "Coca Cola Life", I thought this was a great compromise between taste and calories. I drank quite a lot of that stuff, and suddenly, from one day to the other, the taste absolutely disgusted me. It just felt horribly artifical, and until today it sends a shiver down my spline just seeing those bottles in the supermarket. No idea what made my brain switch.
- tomerv 4y agoI hate it, it has a terrible aftertaste for me.
- notacoward 4y agoDefinitely not the only one. Stevia instantly and completely ruins the taste of anything it's in for me, so when I'm looking at energy or hydration drinks I always have to check the labels carefully. Gives me a bit more empathy for people with more serious allergies and sensitivities, I guess.
- continuational 4y agoAll artificial sweeteners I've tried, I've found absolutely horrible.
- my69thaccount 4y ago
- 01100011 4y agoI've found that stevia works well in small amounts when coupled with sugar, but less sugar than you otherwise would have used. I really like in in my protein shakes along with a couple of dates. Using it as the sole source of sweetness results in the disgusting bitter taste. Maybe i just got lucky with my taste buds though.
- Blackthorn 4y agoIt seems to work a lot better when a big company's flavor chemists handle it with other flavors, versus when I try to do it at home. Like MyProtein's vanilla/chocolate stevia-flavored soy protein. Beats the pants off of my own attempts with unflavored soy protein.
- 01100011 4y agoI find that a lot of presweetened powders are way too sweet for my liking. I just want a subtle sweetness. Im not trying to replicate a milkshake.
- Moldoteck 4y agoWait... Are you using 100% clean stevia? I thought it is sold in a mix with eritrol, where stevia is a small percent of that mix, because it is 400% more sweetness compared to sugar and to prevent bitter
- 01100011 4y agoYep 100% pure powder. It is so strong that your post nasal drip is sweet after using it I mix some into a big jar of whey protein, close it up and mix well. That way i can get my preferred brand of protein with no additives to have just enough sweetness to be palatable when combined with some blueberries and dates.
- klodolph 4y agoI’m not sure what phenylketonuria has to do with this. Phenylketonuria is a rare genetic disorder that leaves you unable to process an amino acid, phenylalanine. This has nothing to do with taste or sugar, as far as I know. It does mean that you have to have a special diet low in phenylalanine to control your phenylalanine levels. A certain percentage of people get a bitter taste from stevia. Kind of like how a certain percentage of people get a soapy taste from cilantro.
- bradknowles 4y agoIn this case, phenylketonuria is the first condition I ever heard of where it could affect your taste buds. I ran into this in high school, when my best friend could taste the slightest amounts of phenylalanine, but no one else in the school could. Our science teacher was very pleased to have him in the class, because he could now dive deeper on genetic conditions, with a real world example right there in the room. And, as it just so happens, cilantro does taste like soap to me, and I have been a subscriber to nocilantro.com for many years. And so now, I've been wondering if there's a similar problem with Stevia, where I am again affected negatively. And so I mentioned phenylketonuria as the poster child for that pattern. Maybe I need to see if there is a nostevia.com domain that I can subscribe to, or create one if not?
- seattle_spring 4y agoI wonder if Stevia will be as sweet once they move to react testing library?
- Scene_Cast2 4y agoWhat's the current consensus on artificial sweeteners overall? How do they stack up in terms of healthiness, taste, and cost? Are there other parameters that are important? Context - I've been trying to figure out if there are any downsides (besides cost) to using Monk Fruit.
- yesbut 4y agoI don't think monk fruit and stevia are considered artificial sweeteners. I think they fall under the "alternative (to sugar)" sweeteners category. As opposed to artificial sweeteners like saccharin, aspartame, acesulfame potassium, sucralose, etc.
- throwaway290 4y agoYes, sugar and stevia are equally artificial. Both are extracted from a plant with some industrial processing.
- ekianjo 4y agoArtificial usually refers to synthetic
- throwaway290 4y agoThen neither is. So, equally.
- patall 4y agoI think, patent is talking about stevia the plant, whose leaves are quite sweet with a licorice taste when eaten raw or dried. When powdered, you can use those to sweeten i.e tea. You are talking about steviol glycosides that can be extracted, like sugar, from that same plant.
- throwaway290 4y agoNo. What I mean is that processing of stevia plant to obtain sweetener powder is conceptually the same as processing of plants to obtain sugar powder. So either both are artificial, or neither are. FWIW I wouldn't call either artificial. I'm not talking about synthetic stevia as I haven't encountered such.
- danarlow 4y agoIMO the sugar alcohol allulose[1] has crossed the uncanny valley of sweeteners. It tastes (and cooks!) almost like sucrose and it doesn’t have a weird aftertaste. Like erythritol, it is absorbed and excreted unmodified so it is nearly acaloric and doesn’t cause GI problems in reasonable doses. My only minor complaint is that, like erythritol, it causes a slight cooling sensation, so the best use cases are foods that are served chilled. It is naturally occurring at trace levels in some fruits and was first isolated in the 1940s but commercially viable manufacturing methods only became available recently. It’s starting to appear in some low-carb bars, cereals, and ice creams, but it’s still quite hard to find in products. The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed :) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psicose https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psicose
- pmoriarty 4y agoI like allulose, but the kind I tasted was both less sweet and finer than ordinary table sugar. The granularity of it was more like powdered sugar (and like the other artificial sweeteners like stevia, aspartame, xylitol, erythritol, etc) than ordinary table sugar. To me tagatose[1] is way more like ordinary table sugar than any other sweetener that I've tried. In fact, it's indistinguishable from sugar to me. It's a real shame it's not more well known. [1] - https://www.wired.com/2003/11/newsugar/ https://www.wired.com/2003/11/newsugar/
- atombender 4y agoI came cross tagatose in this article [1] about the company Bonumose [2], which has been attempting to commercialize a production process. Their efforts were hampered by some drama — some shady grant fraud involving a key Chinese researcher, with subsequent litigation — which is the premise of the article. But another problem with tagatose, historically, is that it's difficult to scale up the process, which requires processing yeasts with exensive enzymes, to commercial levels. Bonumose claims to have solved that problem, but it's still stuck at the patent licensing stage, from what I can tell. [1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/11/1048913/inside-the-fierce-messy-fight-over-healthy-sugar-tech/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/04/11/1048913/inside-t... [2] http://bonumose.com/ http://bonumose.com/
- epolanski 4y agoThe title is misleading. "Sweeteness" isn't an absolute chemical property of a molecule, it's about the capacity of a molecule to bind with our sweet receptors inside our mouths and the neural response our brain receives. Sweeteners generally have much higher capacity of binding with our sweet receptors, thus they produce a stronger electrical signal towards our brain. Afaik the relative sweeteness is calculated by diluting glucose and sweetener X in a glass of water and then calculating the amount of one compared to the other. E.g. If you need 0.05 grams of a sweetener to obtain the same effect of 1 gram of sugar then it's 20 times more sweet.
- amelius 4y agoCan an enzyme bind to a receptor?
- gilleain 4y agoAs the article describes, the enzyme in the title is a "uridine diphosphate–dependent glucosyltransferase" which "catalyzes the addition of branched glucosides to compounds in stevia". So the sweet compound is not the enzyme, but "diterpenoids called stevioside and rebaudioside A" which are small molecules. Well small-ish, as you can see: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/chebi/searchId.do?chebiId=CHEBI:9271 https://www.ebi.ac.uk/chebi/searchId.do?chebiId=CHEBI:9271 with a formula of C38H60O18 it is 4-5 times the size of a glucose molecule.
- epolanski 4y agoI think the article describes an enzyme for synthesizing a class of sweeteners similar to stevia. This could be used as a cathalyst. What is a cathalyst you may ask? Every chemical reaction is in an equilibrium between reagents (R) and products (P). Products consistently transform in reagents and viceversa, and the equilibrium (more reagent or more product) depends on the relative energy levels. It's like going from a valley to another one, the lower valley will determine if you have more reagent (R) or product (P). But to go between the two valleys there is a mountain. The mountain does not determine whether you will have more P or R, but it determines how much energy (of various forms) to go from valley of reagents to valley of products. Sometimes the mountain between the valleys is so high that no reactions occur or they occur at such a small speed that you will see no difference. Simple example: diamond and graphite. Graphite is MUCH more stable than diamond, because it's energy level is much lower than the one of a diamond. BUT there is a very high mountain between the two forms, thus it takes millions of years for a diamond to transform into graphite and you don't see your jewelry turning into pencils (even though, eventually it will). What catalysts do is that they basically lower the mountain: the reactions from R to P and P to R become much faster, now I can go from valley to valley with ease.[1] This means that you can chemically engineer new sweeteners, potentially much more sweet. This is good for the producer (needs less sweetener) but also for the consumer (taste is the same, but eats less sweetener). [1]https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image/chp%3A10.1007%2F978-1-84996-408-1_2/MediaObjects/193846_1_En_2_Fig4_HTML.gif https://media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image...
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y agoDoes anyone else get a weird feeling in their mouths after eating something with sucralose? For me it's like there's a coating on my tongue that lasts an hour or so after having anything that sweetener.